Mockingjay

Mockingjay is the third novel in Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games series. The bestselling YA dystopia series is comprised of a trilogy: The Hunger Games (2008), Catching Fire (2009) and Mockingjay (2010). In 2020, Collins published The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2020), a prequel to The Hunger Games.

Much of Mockingjay relies on the assumption that readers are familiar with the events of The Hunger Games and Catching Fire. The trilogy is set in a futuristic dystopia called Panem, located in the ruins of a North America destroyed by war and climate change. Panem consists of 13 variously impoverished districts and the wealthy federal district of the Capitol, ruled by the sadistic President Coriolanus Snow. The Capitol exploits the districts for labor and supplies while ensuring that their people remain on the brink of starvation. After a failed insurrection by the districts, the Capitol instituted the Hunger Games, a televised annual event in which 24 “tributes”—children from the districts—are forced to enter an arena and fight to the death until only one remains.

Katniss Everdeen is the protagonist of the Hunger Games series. At 16, Katniss survives the 74th Hunger Games along with Peeta Mellark, using her resilience and quick wit to force the Capitol into crowning them the first-ever pair of victors. Katniss’s subversive actions ignite a full-scale war between the districts and the Capitol. This war is the focus of Mockingjay.

Though the Hunger Games novels are classified as YA coming-of-age narratives, Collins has been praised for her sophisticated exploration of weighty themes such as trauma, survivors’ guilt, social inequality, and the cost of war. Like most dystopian novels, the Hunger Games examines real-world problems through the lens of a fictional society. Mockingjay focuses on the consequences of war, including the power of propaganda and the way that war affects morality.